In an earlier post, B2B eCommerce Opportunities in Today's Economy, I mentioned a couple of ways IT executives may be handling budgets and staff in the current economic climate. Many IT executives are asking eCommerce managers to slash headcount, curtail integration efforts, and defer key eCommerce projects. My notion was that in these companies IT has to constantly sell business areas on the value of their existence or face shrinking budgets and relevance to their organizations.
Also discussed was a second type of organization, one where IT value is recognized and valued. These companies are using their eCommerce groups, among others; to develop solutions that bring efficiency, productivity, reduced cycle times, and business process modeling / management to the organization.
A survey I have recently stumbled across from Information Week, Outlook 2009, supports the two categories above from the prior post and a third which my prior post did not address, a status quo category. The survey responses indicate three categories from an IT spending, hiring, and project demand perspective.
In terms of IT spending, a third of organizations plan to reduce IT spending, a third plan to hold steady, and a third are increasing over 2008. As for hiring, 57% will be cutting staff or not backfilling vacancies (14%). And 43% of companies will re-populate vacancies as they arise or expand staff (14%).
The measure I find most interesting, especially when blended with the other pieces of the survey, is process improvement related project demand. Demand for these types of projects stand to increase 44% over 2008. In 40% of organizations, the demand for these projects are to remain the same. And 16% estimate they will have few projects requested or approved.
So if you agree with my position in the B2B eCommerce Opportunities in Today's Economy post, that eCommerce groups and infrastructure are best positioned to assist with process improvement projects, and that these projects allow things to be done better, faster, and cheaper. Let us compare project demand against the staffing and funding portions of the survey.
44% of organizations have rising project demand yet only 33% have increasing budgets. Either the rising demand will be met with increased budget, resources will be utilized from other projects, contract labor will be utilized, or there will be a buildup in project backlogs. Similarly on the other end of the spectrum, only 16% anticipate less project demand, yet 33% will be reducing budgets leaving 17% that will be experiencing the same demand but less budget with which to work on process improvement projects. eCommerce resources will be a busy bunch in 2009. This is supported by the less than average IT unemployment rate of 3.2% cited in the survey, and by the resource demand we have experienced at Remedi thus far in 2009.
So which categories are you in? Which ones would you like to be in? While you may not be where you would like due to organizational constraints, my hope is this survey and my brief observations help you position your projects and initiatives to support your organization and get the funding required to carry those projects out.
